Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (27 page)

“No,” Valachi replied. “It’s not Mafia. That’s the expression the outsiders uses [sic].”

Fencing with Valachi, Flynn bluffed, saying he knew that the real name began with
cosa
and waited for an answer. The agent recalled that Valachi blanched then said,
“Cosa Nostra.
So you know about it.”

Cosa Nostra. Our Thing. It became part of the American idiom. Uncovering the confidential organizational name was a delicious bureaucratic triumph for Hoover over Harry Anslinger, the head of the Narcotics Bureau, who for twenty years had championed the name Mafia. Forgetting his past disclaimers that a crime organization with national links existed, Hoover took total credit for having unearthed the name of the dreaded crime syndicate. Continuing the FBI ban on the title Mafia, Hoover, adding an unnecessary article to the name, adopted “La Cosa Nostra (inaccurately, The Our Thing)” and the abbreviation, LCN, as the crime organization’s only proper appellation in FBI official documents and statements. Other law-enforcement agencies, officials, and the media, however, continued to use Mafia as an equally accurate designation for the families and the Commission.

Robert Kennedy seized upon Joe Valachi’s defection as the ideal prop to garner support from Congress and the public for his assault on the newly minted LCN or Mafia. Reminiscent of the publicity engendered by the Kefauver Committee hearings, in the fall of 1963, Valachi was presented through television at hearings before Senator McClellan’s investigations committee as the nation’s first reliable witness on the inner workings of the Mafia. Unlike the faceless Frank Costello at the Kefauver hearings, Valachi appeared in full view before the cameras, and under gentle questioning from the senators, described his initiation as a mafioso, the murders that he knew about, and his other sordid experiences as a soldier.

The FBI displayed photographs, charts, and graphs for the committee and the TV audience, seeking to present an image of the families as rigidly organized military units, with strictly defined duties for each rank. While it was a generally accurate outline of each family’s framework, the portrait missed the essential point that each member was an individual entrepreneur who had to be an earner and a producer to survive, prosper, and advance. Valachi stressed the necessity of illegal business skills when asked by Senator Karl Mundt of South Dakota if he got a regular paycheck from the family’s boss. “You don’t get any salary, Senator,” Valachi explained, adding that part of his loot had to be given to the hierarchs.

“Well, you get a cut then,” Mundt continued.

“You get nothing,” Valachi said. “Only what you earn yourself. Do you understand?”

Questioned by senators from rural and agricultural states about the large number of Italian-Americans from big cities in the rackets, Valachi countered with a valid explanation. “I’m not talking about Italians. “I’m talking about criminals.”

Before his public appearance, Valachi had been coached by agents, spoonfed information about other families that the bureau had picked up through electronic surveillance. Subtly brainwashed, Valachi believed his disclosures before the committee emanated from his own experiences and intimate understanding of the American Mafia. Hoover had used him as a transmitter to publicize facts the FBI wanted Congress and the public to know about the Mob, without revealing that the data had been obtained through unconstitutional methods.

Valachi’s Cosa Nostra knowledge was primarily limited to his activities in one crew or subgroup of a family, and he lacked evidence and leads that could generate a single indictment. Comparatively ignorant of details about other New York families and borgatas in the rest of the country, Valachi was even unaware that Chicago’s Mob called itself “the Outfit,” New England’s was “the Office,” and Buffalo’s was “the Arm.” He also harped on second-hand historical stories, misleading the FBI and the senators into accepting the gory tale of “The Night of the Sicilian Vespers.”

When Lucky Luciano arranged the September 1931 murder of Salvatore Maranzano, Valachi told the spellbound senators, a wave of gangland slayings eliminated Luciano’s enemies throughout the country. Valachi wrongly verified long-persisting rumors that the death toll ranged from a dozen to more than one hundred, with forty knocked off in one day of mass executions. Believers of the supposed massacre named it “The Sicilian Vespers” purge, a reference to the thirteenth-century violent uprising against the French. As late as 1987, the FBI gave credence to the 1931 “Vespers” yarn by citing it in an official report on the history of La Cosa Nostra.

But a study in 1976 by historian Humbert S. Nelli of the gangland hits two weeks before and two weeks after Maranzano’s murder, discounted Valachi’s “Vespers” concoction. Nelli found that on the day of the killing and in the following three months, three Mob-style slayings were reported in the New York area and one in Denver. It was even unclear if those four hits were related to Maranzano’s assassination and they certainly did not constitute a bloodbath.

Despite Valachi’s shortcomings, his testimony gave investigators a rough sketch of the dimensions of the Mafia’s strength and its operational methods. So
little had been known about the Mob’s inner workings that his revelations engrossed the public. Valachi may have been a low-ranking hoodlum, but he was the first “made” man to shatter the oath of
omertà
and provide accurate details about the Mafia’s customs and codes of behavior. And with Hoover and the attorney general endorsing Valachi’s accounts, all of the nation’s law-enforcement agencies—even previous naysayers—had to jump on the bandwagon to acknowledge the existence of the Mafia or LCN, even if they disagreed with the magnitude of its threat.

For his cooperation, Valachi obtained the most comfortable treatment and lavish furnishings the Federal Bureau of Prisons could provide. A two-room air-cooled prison suite with couches and a kitchenette, isolated from the general inmate population, was built for him at the La Tuna Penitentiary near El Paso, Texas. The FBI and the Bureau of Prisons had sound reasons to quarantine their celebrity inmate and fear for his safety. At the time that Valachi testified, an FBI bug on Stefano Magaddino, the Buffalo boss and a Commission member, heard his views on Valachi. “We passed laws that this guy has got to die,” Magaddino said to his underlings. William Hundley, the Justice Department official, who served as Valachi’s counsel at the Senate hearings, said a plan by Robert Kennedy to provide Valachi with a new identity and “put him and a girlfriend on a desert island fell through.” Valachi’s solitary existence, always alone except for guards, was not a bed of roses; he once tried to commit suicide by hanging. In 1971, at age sixty-eight, Joe Valachi died in prison of natural causes.

On Friday, November 22, 1963—a month after Valachi’s groundbreaking testimony before a Senate committee—President John F. Kennedy was assassinated riding in an open limousine in a motorcade in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza. Barely an hour later, in another section of Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four-year-old ex-Marine and a supporter of left-wing causes, was arrested and accused of murdering President Kennedy and gunning down a police officer who tried to apprehend him. Two days later, as Oswald was being escorted from the basement of the Dallas police headquarters to a county jail, a stubby middle-aged man jumped out of a crowd of news reporters and photographers and fatally shot Oswald; live television captured the scene.

The gunman was Jack Ruby, a raunchy local nightclub owner, with longtime ties to organized-crime figures. By audaciously killing Oswald, Ruby would emerge as an enigmatic segment of a larger vexing puzzle: Did the Mafia plot the assassination of a president?

“The Ring of Truth”

V
ice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, riding in another limousine in the motorcade on that fateful Friday in Dallas, was uninjured, and that day took the oath of office as president. With the prime goal of determining if Kennedy had been the victim of a foreign or a domestic conspiracy, Johnson appointed a commission headed by the highly respected Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States, to issue a conclusive report on the assassination. The Warren Commission relied on the FBI as its main investigative arm after Hoover craftily usurped jurisdiction from the Secret Service, the agency responsible for protecting the president. Hoover spearheaded the investigation through an obscure jurisdictional technicality that federal property had been destroyed when the assassin’s bullet struck the windshield of the president’s limousine.

Dependent essentially on the bureau’s detective work, the commission issued its findings in September 1964. The main conclusions ratified Hoover’s analysis: there had been no conspiracy; Oswald, a disgruntled loner with a history of erratic behavior, was the sole shooter, firing a cheap mail-order rifle from a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked. The bulk of the FBI investigation was hastily completed in less than a month. Under Hoover’s orders, many investigative areas and clues were ignored.

Almost from the moment the commission’s 888-page report was released, its
essential judgments came under withering fire as being inaccurate, misleading, and undermined by glaring omissions. A large crop of critics disputed the commission’s verdict that Oswald was the lone gunman. These challenges—centering on the number of bullets fired and the direction they came from—generated a large variety of conspiracy theories.

The first suspects were the Mafia and Fidel Castro.

Leads about the Mob’s possible complicity trickled out gradually over the years and much of it was compiled and revealed in 1979. That year, a select committee of the House of Representatives completed a two-year reevaluation of the Warren Commission’s investigation. A principal area that the committee explored was the possibility of a Mafia scheme to murder the president as the most effective method of halting his brother’s crusade against them. Another assassination theory stemmed from the Central Intelligence Agency’s recruitment of influential mafiosi in the early 1960s to help kill Castro, thereby inciting the Cubans to retaliate by murdering President Kennedy.

Evidence that many Cosa Nostra leaders feared Robert Kennedy’s offensive against them and of their rising hatred of the attorney general and the president were found by the committee in previously secret FBI files. The intriguing information came from bugs installed before the assassination, during Hoover’s clandestine electronic surveillance catch-up program against the Mob.

Hoover had withheld important information from the Warren Commission. He did not reveal the existence of the bugs and the valuable evidence and insight derived from them. The commission was never aware that the FBI had recorded the rampant hostility expressed by important mafiosi toward the Kennedys. In another odd twist, Hoover had assigned the assassination probe in 1963 to the FBI division that handled bank robbery and destruction of federal property investigations. The two most qualified FBI units for looking into domestic or foreign conspiracies, the organized-crime and national security divisions, were largely sidetracked from participating in the investigation. Congressional investigators later speculated that Hoover’s unorthodox assignment was deliberate. They said he might have feared that a more wide-ranging examination by qualified agents and hard-nosed prosecutors would have exposed the illegal bugging and blighted his reputation.

By the time the congressional committee began its work in the late 1970s, the FBI tapes had been erased or destroyed. The new investigators were forced to fall back on incomplete summaries and partial transcripts of the recorded conversations. Most of the suggestive threats made by mobsters were plucked
from fragments of longer conversations. The covert FBI bugs revealed outright loathing of the Kennedy brothers, particularly Robert. In the taped conversations, many mobsters reviled individual FBI agents, but there were surprisingly few threats or malicious comments aimed at J. Edgar Hoover.

On May 2, 1962, agents heard Michelino “Mike” Clemente, an important captain in New York’s Genovese family, express his views to several soldiers. “Bob Kennedy,” Clemente warned, “won’t stop today until he puts us all in jail all over the country. Until the Commission meets and puts its foot down, things will be at a standstill.” Stressing the need for increased secrecy to thwart Kennedy, he added, “When we meet, we all got to shake hands, and sit down and talk, and, if there is any trouble with a particular regime [family], it’s got to be kept secret, and only the heads are to know about it, otherwise some broad finds out, and finally the newspapers.”

A year later in May 23, 1963, Stefano Magaddino, Joe Bonanno’s cousin, the boss of the Buffalo borgata, and a member of the Commission, was apprehensive about the government’s inroads, lamenting to lieutenants, “We are in a bad situation in Cosa Nostra. They know everything under the sun. They know who’s back of it, they know
amici
, they know
capodecina
, they know there is a Commission. We got to watch right now, this thing, where it goes and stay as quiet as possible.”